A few weeks ago, Cloonee called a plumber to come look at a broken pipe at his house on the Westside of Los Angeles, a decidedly unglamorous activity for a jet-setting DJ.
After the sink was fixed, Cloonee says, “I was signing the invoice, and the plumber was like, ‘I’ve just got to say, man, I really enjoyed your set.’” This wasn’t long after Cloonee, in a more jet-setting move, hired a company to come over and clean one of his cars. One of the service people showed up in a hat emblazoned with the word “Prospa,” the fellow U.K. artist with whom Cloonee made “Free Your Mind,” one of the biggest dance tracks of the summer. When the guy in the hat saw who was answering the door, his eyes got wide.
These days, these moments are happening more and more. “I get stopped all over the place,” Cloonee says from his light-filled living room, which is decorated with skateboard decks and framed concert posters. The real Cloonee sits in a chair across from me, while another stares at me from the coffee table, where there’s a copy of Cloonee’s recent DJ Mag cover.
He is, in fact, one of the moment’s main dance guys, a status further cemented today (Oct. 6) with the release of his debut album, Are You Still You? A 16-track project made to smash dancefloors, the LP is out on Cloonee’s own Hellbent Records and was created upstairs in an extra bedroom he turned into a studio. He wasn’t even really trying to make an album, but was just pumping out tunes this past December and January.
“I had a folder with loads of music, and when we looked at it, I remember saying to [my manager] James like, ‘I think this might be the album. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.’”
And so it was. While he and his team — which includes manager James Ahearn, who’s also here with us in the living room — initially planned to release the album early next year to add momentum to some as-yet-unannounced 2027 shows, the momentum was actually already so big that they decided to just drop it now.
“I think when ‘Free Your Mind’ started going, we all kind of thought like, “Oh, this is going to be a moment,’” says Cloonee. “It would be stupid to not capitalize on it now.” Indeed, “Free Your Mind” has 208.5 million on-demand official streams globally to date, according to Luminate, and is in its 27th week on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, where it peaked at No. 4 and is currently at No. 7. Released in March, the track is centered around the hooks from Sybil’s 1993 heater “Oh, How I Love You,” a sample that gives the song a ‘90s feel that also runs throughout Are You Still You?.
The sample from the O’Jays’ “Now That We Found Love” — recognizable to most as the sample that forms basis of the 1991 song of the same name by Heavy D & The Boys — made it into Cloonee’s “Get Up and Dance” after he heard Heavy D in a taxi while cruising across Ibiza to Franky Rizardo’s place. “I Shazamed it on the way to his house then sat down and started making the song in his kitchen.”
The album contains various styles of house music, from the slinky tech house of “3:30AM” to the Latin house of “Movimento” and “Manealo,” with this trajectory encompassing all the eras and styles of Cloonee’s catalog thus far. While he says the project doesn’t necessarily have an overarching message beyond shaking your a–, its name nods to the stylistic changes he’s been through since emerging out of the U.K. in the late 2010s.
“I’ve been releasing music for a long time, and everyone would always want a certain phase of my career back,” he says. “The music I was making from 2014 to 2017, people say, ‘I wish that Cloonee would come back’ and name a song. I would always read those comments and be like, ‘I’m still here.’”
“So with the album,” he continues, “I wanted to prove a point and almost pay homage to the last 12 years. It’s a way of me nodding to the fans that always ask for a certain era of Cloonee and being like, ‘Here he is, and here he is, and here he is, and I’m still me.’”
Cloonee was born David Andrew Bissett, although he introduces himself as Dave when he opens the front door of his house with a smile, wearing a hoodie and shorts that appear to be from the Hellbent clothing brand built into his label. Now 31, he grew up near Manchester and later attended Sheffield Hallam University, with his first official release being 2014’s “Want It.” His predilection for hooks from ‘80s and ‘90s existed even then, with this single heavily sampling Soul II Soul’s 1989 classic “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).”
He worked his way through the U.K. club scene and moved to the U.S. during the late pandemic, having gotten several booking offers from Chris Lake to come to America as a support act. His agent, CAA’s Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi (whose roster also includes Anyma and Adriatique) helped him get the visa that allowed him to travel during Covid.
With this he became the opener for Lake’s two-night run at San Diego’s Petco Park in July of 2021, when venues were just reopening post-pandemic. “I remember DJing and the crowd was pretty good, and I thought ‘This is crazy.’” he says. “Then when Chris started DJing, I was like, ‘This is f–king bonkers.’ I’d never seen a crowd that big for a DJ, and I’d never seen a crowd bouncing up and down like that to a DJ.”
It reminded him of the ways crowds behaved at the metal shows he grew up attending, and he liked that. And so in America he’s stayed, setting up shop here on the Westside of Los Angeles, an area popular with DJs given its proximity to the airport. Roughly 60% of his shows are in the U.S., while the rest are in Europe. “The sheer volume of events and festivals you can do as a DJ in America is unrivaled,” he says, with fans flocking to his shows on the back of hits like “Free Your Mind,” 2024’s massive “Stephanie” and that same year’s “Sippin Yak.”
L.A. has become more than just a place to live. In June of 2025, he postponed a pair of L.A. shows amid ICE raids throughout the city, at that time releasing a statement saying “’I will not throw a party whilst the Latino people who have supported me in this city are hurting.” The move made him one of the very few dance artists to say or do anything amid raids targeting the city’s massive Latin population.
“We were going back and forth,” he says of the decision to postpone the shows. “The promoters were saying we were still good to go ahead, but something just didn’t feel right. I remember saying I was going to sleep on it and get back to them in the morning, and as soon as I woke up, I texted my team that we were canceling. My tour manager [who is Mexican] rang me immediately like, ‘You have no idea how much I appreciate you canceling these shows.’ He’s said he wasn’t going to come work for me if I’d done them.”
It hasn’t been a one-off gesture. In 2025, he partnered with L.A. organization Para Los Niños, which supports children in downtown L.A. (a major hub for dance music in the city), donating $30,000 and taking part in activities like a career day for students interested in the music industry and a recent day with the L.A. Galaxy soccer team that found him playing footie with kids from Para Los Niños. This holiday season, he’ll again partner with the organization on a toy drive.
“The angle I’ve taken is that amidst whatever political drama is happening, there are innocent bystanders caught up in it,” he says. “For instance, the parents of the kids in this school are affected. I’m not even a big kid person. Like, I love dogs. If you’d told me two years ago that I’d be helping this kids charity and having fun with it, I wouldn’t have believed you. Now I look forward to it all year.” (Additionally, his fundraiser for L.A. Wildfire relief raised $73,000, including a $20,000 donation he made himself)
“Especially with doing stuff like the toy drive, seeing fans come down with their kids, you appreciate them more on a human level.”
And so, there’s much to celebrate. Today, Cloonee is getting together with 40-ish people from his core team for a party around the album and all the wins that lead to it. But in true DJ form, he says “the next day I fly to Ibiza, and then it’s kind of nonstop until Christmas.” And well after, too. Having become a hard ticket beast, he advises that “some of the venues we have lined up for next year are places I never in my wildest dreams thought were places a DJ would sell tickets like that.”
The plumber already knows who he is. Soon, everyone else will too.
